How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions
In The Future of Change, Ray Brescia identifies a series of “social innovation moments” in American history. Through these moments — during which social movements have embraced advances in communications technologies — he illuminates the complicated, dangerous, innovative, and exciting relationship between these technologies, social movements, and social change. Brescia shows that, almost without fail, developments in how we communicate shape social movements, just as those movements change the very technologies themselves.
Read below for an excerpt from the book’s introduction.
The American Legion faced its toughest battle yet. For several years, as the Second World War continued to rage in the European and Pacific theaters, the Legion had worked to convince the U.S. Congress to pass what would come to be known as the G.I. Bill, a package of benefits for service men and women returning from the war. To accomplish this, it activated members from its network of over ten thousand local chapters spread throughout the country. It used that network to mobilize public sentiment to support the initiative, encourage the Roosevelt administration to back it, and pressure Congress to approve it. Returning veterans stood to benefit from the groundbreaking program because it would open the doors to college and vocational training and offer many the opportunity to own homes. The Legion harnessed modern communications technologies to promote its message, using radio addresses and short film clips shown in movie theaters. It embarked on letter-writing campaigns and engaged in advocacy with newspaper editorial boards in its efforts to garner public support for the bill. It communicated with its members spread throughout the nation using all manner of communication: the mail, the telegraph, and the telephone. But despite all of these modern means of communication that enabled the Legion to build and coordinate a far-flung network of supporters, its efforts might have been for naught, all because of a hunting trip that occurred mostly beyond the reach of these technologies.
Even though the legislation enjoyed unanimous support in Congress, it still faced the very real possibility of defeat. Despite its efforts managing tens of thousands of volunteers in a network that spanned the nation, the outcome of the legislation in its then-current and generous form hung in the balance because of one person. The Legion had lost track of a single congressman: a swing vote on a crucial committee that controlled the fate of the legislation.
Years of painstaking work came to a head in June 1944, just days after the invasion of Normandy by Allied troops. Members of a select congressional committee in charge of the legislation gathered for an up-or-down vote on the benefits package. After different versions of the bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and Senate, Congress convened a joint conference of senators and representatives to reconcile the differences between the two chambers’ versions of the bill. In order to pass a single version of the legislation, a majority of each of the chambers’ representatives on the committee had to approve it. The members of the committee from the House were deadlocked over a few critical issues. One congressman, a Democrat from Georgia named John Gibson, could decide the outcome. Without his vote, the legislation would stall in Congress. Gibson supported the legislation, but he was not in Washington on the eve of the critical vote. Making matters worse, he could not be found. He was supposed to be at home recuperating from an illness. Even though he was needed in Washington the next day, he had apparently felt good enough to go on a hunting trip in his home state and was unreachable.
The Legion harnessed all means available to track Gibson down. Telephone calls to his home revealed his absence. By one account, when the telephone operator learned of the Legion’s efforts, she disclosed that her husband was fighting in northern France and promised to call Gibson’s home every five minutes until she found him. The Legion enlisted the support of local radio stations in Georgia, which asked their audiences for anyone with knowledge of the congressman’s whereabouts to call Washington. Police officers stopped cars on highways in their search for the missing lawmaker. Reporters at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called throughout the state to find him.
Through this statewide manhunt, the Legion finally located Gibson, and he was whisked back to the nation’s capital by plane in the dead of night to cast his critical vote the next morning. Evoking Paul Revere’s mythic exploits on the eve of the events at Lexington and Concord, Gibson’s trip was dubbed the “Midnight Ride”.¹ Once Gibson appeared in time to register his support for the bill, passage was assured.
The story of the passage of the G.I. Bill reveals how an adaptive grassroots network utilized all the media technologies available to it at the time in creative ways — from the mail and the telegraph to the radio and the cinema — to promote a positive, inclusive message and bring about social change. Innovation in communications technologies created an opportunity for the American Legion; it had at its disposal a vast array of tools to not just communicate with but also coordinate the efforts of its vast network of local chapters to promote adoption of the program. This connection between communications technology and a social movement is not accidental. U.S. history reveals the deep relationship between social change and innovation in the means of communication. When new ways of communicating have emerged, new social movements seem to have risen up in their wake. The rapid spread of the printing press in the New World in the mid-eighteenth century helped spawn a revolution, just as it had a century before in England. The growth of the postal service after the creation of the new American republic helped facilitate the emergence of the Second Great Awakening and other social movements in the early nineteenth century. The steam printing press supercharged the capacities of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. The telegraph spread the word of the birth of the women’s movement. The introduction of the telephone and transcontinental railroad helped launch the suffragettes and the Progressive Era. The radio helped garner support for the New Deal. The television advanced the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. Today, mobile technologies have exposed police brutality in new ways that helped launch the Black Lives Matter Movement.
It might be tempting to say that this apparent connection between new communications technologies and new social movements suggests that technology causes social change to happen. Some today might argue that social media launched the Arab Spring, the Tea Party Movement, and other grassroots efforts that have emerged in recent years. But social change is far more complicated than that, as is its relationship to advances in technology. In this book I examine the link between, on the one hand, innovations in communications technology and methods and, on the other, social movements that appear to have emerged in their wake. I strive not just to understand the many ways in which communications and social movements are connected, but also to identify the components of the successes and failures of these same movements that seem to have a symbiotic relationship to the technology that fuels them.
